One cat, one dish. Two cats, two dishes. Three cats, threes dishes. Certainly seems logical, simple, and very manageable. Anything after that, the game starts to change. In our house, we have seven cats, so you do the math… feeding time for our gang is anything but logical, simple, and manageable.

How cats can tell time is beyond me, but trust me, they can. I get home at approximately 6:00 pm every weekday. The cats are already waiting for me at the door, several minutes BEFORE I get home and make they make it all but impossible for me to get inside the house, as I have to try to walk through a sea of hungry cats. They talk and chatter excitedly to me to tell me about their day, allowing me approximately 2.3 seconds to catch my breathe and relax before they remind me that I have already taken too much time and it is time to feed them dinner. Never mind that I religiously feed them every single day at approximately the same time. They feel they MUST tell me in a very loud chorus of seven unique and loud meows, that IT IS DINNER TIME, lest this is the one time I might possibly forget them.  As if…

Dan will have their clean dishes waiting on the counter for me and the dizzying ordeal begins as I mix together a special concoction of canned food and dry kibble into each dish. Peanut will jump up and try to steal a piece or two of kibble to my left, while Zoey will distract me and jump to the right. Dan will tell them to “get down,” grab Peanut and put her on the floor. Peanut will jump back up. Dan will grab Peanut and yell at Zoey to get down. The cats will circle me in a walking swarm, twenty-eight collective legs of perpetual energy, causing me to constantly be inches away from tripping over them and falling to the floor. This ritual will continue in secession until the food dishes hit the floor. If anyone but me feeds them, the meal is considered null and void and merely a “snack.” In their minds, unless it is me who feeds them, they have not been fed.

After all of this pomp and circumstance, just like Thanksgiving dinner, they will be done eating in about two minutes and calm will return to our world for another 24 hours. The weekends are no exception to the phenonium of their uncanny ability to tell time and the chaos level and need to remind me to feed them remains on a steady course, even on Holidays. You can set you alarm to this, I assure you…